Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Veritasium released a wonderful new video yesterday, "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse" which ..... I'm not going to spoil it for you but you will understand why I responded with the link.

Watching, they discuss a study about gun control and I though omg I was thinking about that recently and the study they presented answers the question I've been pondering about gun control. If you watch the video, you will understand my disappointment.

I had been living in New Orleans including when it had the 8th highest murder rate ... not in the United States but the world in 2022 (it was #1 in US hence not 8th). The city couldn't hire police officers and close 120 position had been unfilled. There is a very strange phenomena happening in the past 2 years, the crime rate in New Orleans is plummeting without police. [1] So, in the Veritasium video, they talk about a gun violence study and I think, that is exactly the question I'm asking. Does gun violence go down if law enforcement is removed from the equation because that is exactly for unknown reasons happening New Orleans today. Nobody is taking away guns in New Orleans and everyone I know has at least 2. I was a little disappointed with the study but tapped my self on the shoulder asking the correct question when presented with it.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno

[1]https://www.fox8live.com/2024/09/19/how-new-orleans-went-mur...

Well, the title of the video is actually wrong.

Smarter people did better than Dumber people. The people with a score of 8,9 on numeracy did the best [1] but not as good as they should've. This is basically best shown on page 12 [2] on the actual paper, people with high numeracy have a better chance of correct answer than low numeracy.

I suspect the effect is even across low & high numeracy but because high numeracy people were more likely to get the correct answer to begin with. Akin to say you playing a toddler in Counter-Strike. You're more likely to win a round than them. So if for a round I disconnect one of your controllers then the disconnection is more likely to cause you a loss than the toddler because the toddler was going to lose anyways, the effect of disconnection for them is dwarfed by their innate ability.

[1]: https://youtu.be/zB_OApdxcno?t=413

[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

The title says that smarter people do worse, which is correct in the sense that their relative performance is 20% worse than less numerically inclined people. They cover this in the latter half of the video. However, in order to believe this was the title’s intent, you would have to assume the title should have read, “Smarter people score worse on political numerical questions than on apolitical numerical questions.” Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.

> Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.

The dude isn't some rushed working single mother. He had amble time to choose what he wanted to convey and instead chose that title.

When your study creates 2 populations (those with good numeracy and those without) and you make a claim that one of those populations "do worse" than it's always implicitly with respect to the other population.

All I can say is your frustration is valid, and welcome to modern YouTube.

I currently still live in New Orleans, and I am willing to bet you the surveillance programs and license plate readers have something to do with it.

The study doesn't replicate.

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